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CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Cleveland City Council will bar the public from attending meetings of a special committee formed to determine whether taxpayers get their money's worth from council-hired consultants.

Council President Kevin Kelley and Council Clerk Pat Britt ruled that the committee will conduct its review in secret, a decision that one good-government advocate, Catherine Turcer at Common Cause Ohio, called a mistake.

“One of the things we need from government is due diligence when it comes to contracting,” Turcer said. “And the public really functions as a critic in that process. We’re talking about taxpayer money, and taxpayers deserve to know whether it’s being well spent.”

The committee -- which Kelley constituted after cleveland.com examined professional services contracts awarded to two longtime council consultants -- is expected to report its findings to council’s Operations Committee in time for the 2015 budgeting process, Kelley said in a written statement last month.

Council spokesman Jim Kopniske wrote in a recent email that the contract review committee is made up of Britt’s staffers, rather than elected officials, and is not required to meet publicly.

Cleveland City Council spends more than $1.6 million each year on contracts with consultants, printers, technology experts and others. Many of those contracts were quietly approved or renewed in December without a committee hearing to determine their merits.

In a written statement, Kelley said he did not want to influence the contract committee’s findings by commenting on individual contracts before the review is complete.

Council unanimously renewed the firm’s contract for a seventh year, though council members interviewed for the story struggled to explain what the firm does or acknowledged that they had never heard of the Cobalt Group.

The consultants’ yearly proposals and monthly invoices describe the scope of their work largely in broad terms with few specifics. The language used in the firm’s latest $66,000 contract states that the firm assists in “directing and providing technical assistance for the implementation of priority issue/opportunity areas of the Cleveland City Council Operations and Sustainability Plan.”

But council members –- including some who have served on the Operations Committee that oversees such contracts -- said that they were unaware that a so-called Sustainability Plan even existed.

Earlier this year, NEOMG reviewed the last five years' worth of work of another consulting firm, The Project Group, and found that, in exchange for its $250,000 contract, it had offered council little legislative guidance.

The firm is paid to brief council on issues related to public utilities. But NEOMG found several instances when The Project Group did not mention problems related to utilities until they already had been exposed by The Plain Dealer or NEOMG.

The review also found that most of The Project Group's written reports to the chairman of council's Public Utilities Committee were redundant from month to month -- with copied and pasted progress updates, many of them on projects that had been completed for years.

And the majority of the firm's periodic "special reports" were regurgitations of presentations by city administrators testifying before council or summaries of the work of other hired consultants.

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